The Green tide turns

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This was published 13 years ago

The Green tide turns

By Paul Austin

The minor party with major ambitions may rue being cocky over preferences.

It was the bombshell of the 2010 Victorian election campaign. The Liberal Party's shock decision to put the Greens last on its how-to-vote cards dominated the front page of The Age on Monday and has been furiously debated ever since. And yet its profound significance has not been fully appreciated.

The Greens had hoped - indeed, expected - that this election would create a new high-water mark in their inevitable rise to major party status. Now, courtesy of the Liberals, this election might instead come to be seen as the moment the Greens surge was halted.

And the Greens will largely have themselves to blame. They were too cocky. They took the major parties - and their preferences - for granted.

Now, a precedent has been set, one that could kill off the Greens as a force in the lower house not just in Victoria but federally and across mainland Australia.

The Greens will complain loudly about those nasty big parties ''ganging up'' to shut them out. But they should not be surprised at this outcome.

Listen to federal Greens leader Bob Brown, talking just days before the Victorian Liberals' decision. The Greens, Brown said, were not like other so-called minor parties that had flashed across the Australian political landscape, happy to create some mischief on the fringes.

Don Chipp's Australian Democrats had famously vowed to ''Keep the Bastards Honest''. But Brown's Australian Greens had much loftier ambitions: they didn't want to keep the bastards honest, they intended to replace the bastards.

Well, now the Victorian Liberals have called Brown's bluff. He insisted the Greens were not a preferences machine for the major parties. But now the Greens are not going to be a preferences destination, at least not for the state Liberals. The message is that if you want to play with the big boys, you'll have to survive on primary votes, not just preferences.

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This will hurt the Greens, big time.

Look at Adam Bandt, the Greens hero of Melbourne, who at the August federal election became the first member of his party to enter the lower house. But he only did it on preferences; he still came second to Labor on the primary vote.

Now, the Victorian Liberals can mess with Bandt's mind. Should they decide to put the Greens last at the next federal election, then Bandt, instead of forging the way for other Greens to storm the House of Representatives, may well be doomed to being a oncer.

Look at the Victorian Parliament. The Greens - back when they were assuming they would get Liberal preferences - had realistic hopes of winning up to four seats in the lower house on Saturday week. Now, it will be a surprise if they win any.

And the danger for the Greens is that the Victorian Liberals' decision will become a model in other states and federally - and for other parties.

Don't rule out Labor doing something similar in future. The Greens might be ideologically closer to Labor than to the Coalition, but they pose an existential threat to the ALP because they are eating into its base. There are plenty of influential Labor figures urging their party to follow the Liberal lead.

Again, the Greens should not be surprised by this. The principle has already been established in this campaign: Labor has decided to direct preferences to the Country Alliance ahead of the Greens in two upper house regions. The Country Alliance's stated purpose is to prevent the Greens and their policies gaining a foothold outside metropolitan Melbourne. The Greens depict alliance members as ''gun-toting, climate-change denialists''. But Labor, for purely pragmatic purposes, is preferring them ahead of the Greens in strategic locations around the state. It mightn't prove hard for Labor in future to prefer the Liberals to the Greens.

From the conservative end of the spectrum, the push is on for the Victorian Liberals' decision to become a template around the country. A wave of relief swept through the state Coalition when the preference decision was made. Ted Baillieu's mood has lifted noticeably. And John Brumby, keen to demonise the Greens when he thought they might be doing a deal with the Libs, is no longer interested in talking much about the minor party - not now that it is his party that is in a de facto alliance with them.

Senior Victorian Liberals are contemptuous of the argument that the party has damaged itself through this decision. Yes, Labor benefits, because it can now feel much more confident about its hold on inner-Melbourne seats previously under siege from the Greens, and can redeploy resources to the fight against the Coalition in the suburbs and the regions.

But the inner-Melbourne seats are left seats: they were never going to the Liberals. If the Greens had won them on Liberal preferences, and if as a result there was a hung parliament, the overwhelming likelihood is that the Greens would have installed a minority Labor government.

That's what happened in Tasmania and the ACT. And Brown and Bandt have signed a formal alliance with Julia Gillard's minority government. Does anyone seriously believe the Greens, if they got the chance, would help install a Lib/Nats Coalition government in Victoria?

The de facto leader of the Greens in Victoria, Greg Barber, repeatedly made the point his party had never actually preferenced the Liberals in Victoria and was not about to start at this election.

The Greens were doing a close-to-comprehensive preferences deal with Labor, while bidding for help from the Liberals in the inner city. In return, the Liberals would get nothing, or next to nothing. And still some Greens were surprised when the Liberals said, ''No deal.''

This is the Greens' great miscalculation of the 2010 Victorian election, and the ramifications will be felt way beyond Saturday week.

Paul Austin is Age state political editor.

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